“Man, those teeth do a lot of damage. If he’d kept at it, he would have gone right through the floor and ended up cuddling in bed with us.”

“God, I hope not!”

“I’ve heard porcupines like plywood. It’s the glue, I think. They also like anything people have sweated on, like ax handles.”

“Glue and sweat, great tastes.”

“To a porcupine, yeah,” he said.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back to bed.”

On the way in, he stopped in the kitchen, grabbed his nature journal to write down the details of the porcupine sighting. So far he had several pages of notes and sketches, mostly of birds, including the great blue heron.

“Come on,” she said. “You can document your Mr. Nibbles encounter in the morning.”

He crawled into bed beside her, put his arm around her. “Nothing like that at the condo in Connecticut,” he said, clearly still excited. A supersized rodent that ate plywood and ax handles might be a nightmare to some, but to Nate it was a thrill.

She kissed his neck, gave it a gentle nibble as she pushed her body against his, heard his breathing quicken. “Still thinking about the porcupine?” she whispered.

“Not at all,” he said, his hands moving up under her nightgown, tugging it off.

. . .

An hour later, she lay awake thinking of the porcupine, remembering the terrible grinding sound of it chewing. Nate, of course, was out cold, naked beside her, his limp arm draped over her stomach.

She closed her eyes, willed herself to sleep.

But she couldn’t get the chewing noises from her head.

She imagined an old woman with pointed teeth chewing her way up through their floor.

My, what big teeth you have.

She woke to sunlight streaming in through their small, narrow, prisonlike rectangular bedroom window. God help them if there were ever a fire in another part of the trailer—they’d never get out.

Nate was not beside her. She looked at her watch. Nearly nine o’clock. How had she managed to sleep so late? And how had she not noticed Nate getting out of bed?